Buckley fondly recalls Super season

January 28, 2008|By Andrew Carter, Sentinel Staff Writer

The confetti fell on and around Terrell Buckley that Sunday night inside the Louisiana Superdome. He stood somewhere on the turf and held his two daughters in his arms while he watched his teammates celebrate and the colored paper fall from above.

Moments earlier, New England Patriots kicker Adam Vinatieri had made a 48-yard field goal as time expired to give his team a 20-17 victory against the St. Louis Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI. The Patriots were champions. And at long last, so, too, was Buckley.

"That's one of my most memorable pictures," he said recently of the postgame scene. "It's like, wow, this is it, it doesn't get any better than this."

Before that night on Feb. 3, 2002, Buckley, a cornerback who was one of the best to ever play at Florida State, had played with three other teams during his nine seasons in the NFL. He left FSU for the pros after his junior season in 1992, the year before the Seminoles won their first national championship.

And while Buckley traveled from Green Bay to Miami to Denver, he sometimes wondered if he'd ever play in the Super Bowl.

"I had been on some very good teams that made it to the second round of the playoffs and felt like I should have played in a few Super Bowls but it hadn't happened," he said.

He left the Miami Dolphins at the end of the 1999 season and set forth, Buckley said, to "try to find that hot team." He thought he'd found that in Denver, with the Broncos, but Buckley played there just a season before he joined the Patriots.

These days, of course, unbeaten New England is the heavy favorite to defeat the New York Giants on Sunday in Super Bowl XLII. But then, the Patriots were up-and-coming -- a mix of sound veteran players like Buckley and talented young bucks like quarterback Tom Brady.

The oddsmakers made the Patriots two-touchdown underdogs against the Rams and their mighty offense, dubbed then the "Greatest Show on Turf." Yet Buckley and his teammates sensed they could be special.

"We had a team full of vets, same thing they have now," Buckley said. "[We were at the] end of our careers but we still had something left. It was one mind -- all about winning.

"I am so thankful and happy and proud and blessed to have been on a team like that . . . this was the first time ever [in my career] that the whole team was all on one page."

Buckley can close his eyes and experience all over again the tinges of the energy he felt that night on the field during warm-ups -- a vibe he'd never encountered.

And all these years later, Buckley can still remember how his palms began to sweat before kickoff.

"That means I was really into it," he said. " . . . That was a very good sign."

Buckley, who finished his 14-year NFL career in 2005 with 50 interceptions, didn't start against the Rams. Nonetheless, he provided late in the second quarter one of the game's key defensive plays: a fumble recovery and 15-yard return to set up the Patriots' second touchdown, which gave them a 14-3 lead.

"Playing for history and pride -- it doesn't get any better than that," Buckley said. "That's what you get in the Super Bowl . . . and that's why you see guys crying at the end when they lose. It's that emotional.